Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970)

His star pupils include many notable Soviet directors, including Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Barnet and Kalatozov. Of his former mentor, Pudovkin is quoted as having declared “We make film, Kuleshov made cinematography.”* In fact, Kuleshov’s influence over Soviet cinema of the 1920s is undeniable.

Born in 1899, Lev Kuleshov belonged to the first generation raised with cinema. The Lumière’s cinematograph was first introduced to Russia in 1896. The first Russian film studio was founded when Kuleshov was just eight years old. Just over a decade later, he became a leading filmmaker and film theorist and worked to transform the medium beyond its theatrical roots to an art form in its own right.

Kuleshov began his film career as a set designer for director Evgenii Bauer. In 1917, he made his directorial debut with The Project of Engineer Prite (1917), a melodramatic detective story that would give cinemagoers their first insight into the 18-year-old director’s love of American popular cinema. Among his chief influences was D.W. Griffith, whose use of crosscutting would lead Kuleshov to devise his montage theory. Editing was crucial to Kuleshov’s filmmaking process, and became the focus of his early experimentation, his most famous experiment resulting in the “Kuleshov effect.”

In 1919, Kuleshov helped to found the First National Film School in Moscow, where he became a teacher just one year later. There he met and later married one of his students, Alexandra Khokhlova, who became a key collaborator and star in many of his films. During the early period of the Film School, there was a shortage of raw film stock in Russia. Kuleshov devised for his pupils a workshop that involved staging five live shows that demonstrated various cinematic techniques. In 1924, as new stock became available, primed and eager film students finally got their opportunity to work on a real film directed by Kuleshov. The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924) was intended to serve as a validation for the director’s theories of cinema. An American-inspired comedy infused with Soviet political ideology, the film starred Pudovkin, Barnet and Porfori Podobed as the naïve American, Mr. West.

His next film, Death Ray (1925), became immediately problematic for him with the Soviet government. Unhappy with the film’s perceived lack of propaganda, they stripped Kuleshov’s budget and relieved of his stock company. His next film, By the Law (1926), which was based on a Jack London story, was also deemed to be lacking in propagandistic messages. This tension between Kuleshov and the government would continue until he gave up filmmaking in 1933 to become a full-time theorist.

During the Second World War, Kuleshov returned to filmmaking. He became the head of the Moscow Film Institute in 1944. However, by the 1950s, he had become a largely forgotten figure in Soviet cinema. In 1960, Jay Leyda (founder of the film journal Kino) rediscovered Kuleshov’s films and helped launch a revival of his work in Europe and Russia. As a result, the elderly filmmaker spent his later years touring the West, serving on film festival juries and lecturing.